How Well Our Group Coped When Problems Arose - Ellie

I think our group fared okay with problems as we didn't encounter any hugely disastrous ones.
I think this is because of the simplicity of our idea, and how it mostly involved interviews and easy to film footage, so mostly the only thing we had to worry about was coordinating our schedules with our interviewees for when we were able to film them, and if the studio at college was free when we needed it for some of the interviews - scheduling interviews prior to when we would like to film prevented us from having the issue of our interviewees being unavailable when we wanted them.

However, although we did not encounter too many big problems during filming, we did have an issue with sound when in the studio filming some of the interviews. This is because we were relying on the camera's inbuilt microphone and, in the echoey studio, it could pick up loud sound from the adjoining room. We watched the footage back and decided that, for the most part, it is only really noticeable when you focus on it (if you know it's there) and when the interviewee goes silent - so, to fix this, we cut the footage affected in such a way that there aren't pauses where you can hear the background noise, as well as added faint background music during the interview answers; this solved the majority of this problem as well as, I believe, simultaneously raising the quality of our documentary by making it more professional and easy to watch. We were planning on including faint background music anyway but the volume we made it was sometimes affected by how loud it had to be to cover up the background voices without washing out the interviewee's voice.

We also faced a rather large issue when using Final Cut Express: there was an error and almost all of the editing we had completed up to that point was deleted and we had to start practically from scratch, thereby losing the time we had spent editing up to that point - following this, however, we made sure to save regularly (especially after editing difficult areas of footage) so that Final Cut would be able to keep up and so that if there were any more errors we would have a recent save to fall back on and would not lose nearly as much work.

We have also encountered the problem of Victoria being absent on the day of the deadline, our project being saved on her account, and it being almost but not quite finished; to fix this we have attempted to contact her for her mac login details so that we will be able to complete the final stages and touches of editing and meet the deadline.

Although I feel that not too many problems arose, I think that when they did we handled them calmly and logically, and generally managed them quite well.